Social science and nuclear war

Abstract

These first two volumes of a landmark series on social science and nuclear war are published as both phenomena appear to be becoming obsolete. We remain 30 minutes from nuclear annihilation with no direct control over our own destiny, but the issue has practically disappeared from our policy and intellectual agenda. Similarly, postmodernism, deconstruction, and the end of positivism make the establishment of agreement on empirical relationships by replicable analysis of multiple cases seem rather quaint. In fact, however, this apparent obsolescence tells us more about intellectual fads than about reality. The threat of nuclear war remains, and social science is still one of the few ways that give us more than a random chance of avoiding it. The editors of this series adopt the conventional notion that the major threat of nuclear war is a superpower collision. Such a collision remains possible, but a much more likely scenario is that Third World governments will develop and use nuclear weapons on one another. This scenario makes nuclear war both more likely and less threatening, at least to those people not in the countries directly involved. It also suggests that we need to know more about escalation and the spread of violence, and that our extensive literature on crisis behavior needs to be examined to see if it holds for